Magic Kingdom Dispatch

Writing for oblivion.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

On Pseudonymity

My bro Marty wrote the lone Amazon review that is up on my second book, Revelation, though one reviewer did post comments on SOCNET that were so perceptive that I was compelled to publish them as an article.

The irony is that some will consider this all incredibly vain: I am just selling books, friends. And I give away more than I sell. In the end analysis I am just a writer who wants to write more and who wants to be read.

My SOCNET reviewer prefers not to identify himself beyond his pseudonym, SMP52, the significance of which I happen to know, but his secret is safe with me.

The strange thing is that Revelation outperforms on Academia.edu, where it is available for free download. I wrote a follow up article that hit the top 2% on that site, pushing me into the top 4% of writers there, if only for a little while.

That article and Revelation attracted a global audience, with readers across Europe, in Tibet and Nepal and India, in South America, and throughout the US. This is all supremely satisfying, but there is a Darwinian bottomline for books, and Revelation's sales barely exceed a thousand copies.One question for a writer is how many readers are willing to spend precious minutes reading something that the writer wrote. Another question is how many readers are willing to spend money to read that writing. These are points on a continuum, but there is a chasm separating the two.

It is impossible for me to confirm how many times Revelation was downloaded and read for free on GoogleBooks, on Academia and ResearchGate, or from my website Samizdat. But we can safely estimate that more than a thousand readers across all modalities read it since I released it on my birthday a couple of months ago. We cannot assume that everybody who purchased Revelation read it. Some surely found it unreadable. I feared as I wrote it that nobody would read it. It is a very different manuscript for me. Still, I was compelled to write it. Conversely we cannot assume that everybody who read Revelation for free turned around and purchased it. It is human nature to accept something freely given and to think nothing more on it.It must be enough for me if those who can benefit from Revelation find their way to it. The multiverses do work in mysterious ways, and that is not just a platitude. The book is proof of it.

For eBooks, and for print-on-demand softcovers, I am told that a thousand copies sold is very good. I enjoy no marketing budget and I wield no marketing expertise. I just write my books and then I talk about them until my friends are tired of me.

My recent books are exceptional for me in that I put my birth name on the byline. I published many times using noms de plume. Many of my works will never be connected to me. There were good reasons for using a pseudonym. In some cases I was motivated by safety. In other cases by vanity. In yet other cases, I knew that an anonymous work or a work written under an obviously fictitious byline would achieve greater traction in the popular mind space than one written by me.

Some may consider it strange, but pseudonymity carries farther and delivers harder. We need look no further than Anonymous for example, or better, at the infamous Q Anon.

Q was concocted on the 'chans, 4chan and 8chan, like many other LARPs, and it was initially done for the Lulz. But the mystery over Q's identity morphed into a social juggernaut, scaring neoliberals silly and so mesmerizing the MAGA faithful that Catherine Austin Fitts characterized Q as "hope porn."

Nobody wants Q to be real more than me, but the origins of Q were unassailably exposed on YouTube by Nathan Stolpman of Lift the Veil and grey hat hacker Defango, whose real name is Manuel Chavez III. Defango also blew the cover of Cicada 3301, but he is very much a niche informant: most YouTube viewers do not watch Defango and normal folks never heard of him.

Still, there is enough perplexing coherence to Q drops that the Q phenomenon continues. Many of the Q faithful do not care who Q is, and no matter how you assess Q's Socratic statements, they do make loyalists question and research. For many, this is enough.

Alex Jones claims to know the identity of the authentic Q, but this must be weighed like everything else that master showman says. While early interpreters of Q's gnomic utterances like Dr. Jerome Corsi faded away, successors continue, reaping eyeballs and payments from YouTube.

For myself, Q lost me forever when promised arrests and prosecutions never happened, no matter how much the Q'verse wanted them. When those mythic sealed indictments precipitate convictions, then I will consider once again giving Q the time of day. Until then, Q, for me, is just entertainment. One more stream of consciousness to consider in a deluge of information, most of it fake, most of it propaganda.

But pseudonymity enjoys a long tradition: too long, really, for this article. I could write a book on pseudonymity in literature. During the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, publishing could literally be a life-risking endeavor. The Inquisition is mute proof of it. I address the immolation of Giordano Bruno in Revelation.

In antiquity, imitations and commentaries on the classics were written by writers who felt that they would receive broader distribution by pretending to be ancient. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is an example, and there are many others.

In my own case, for writing that is published under my own byline, I now follow a modern template adapted by JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. They both forbade photographs and videos of themselves during their lifetimes.

Former 2d Bat Ranger John Czarnecki, myself and Phil Warner at the FBI HRT Safehouse on BIAP in Baghdad, circa 2003. Both Phil and Czar were assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group at the time and I was employed by a notorious private military company. I still miss my "going out to dinner" submachine gun. I had a glorious gun collection in Baghdad.

I promote historical photos of myself. Nothing contemporary. The most recent full face photo that is available of me on the net is circa 2003 in Baghdad, with myself and Ranger brother John Czarnecki and Phil Warner at the FBI HRT safehouse on BIAP.

There are also some profile shots of me taken in Malaysia when I worked with LTC Jack Muth, USMC, at the Malaysian Infantry School in 2005.

Malaysian Infantry Center, 2005.

When I was interviewedfor a Military Channel video on Operation Urgent Fury in 2005, the appearance contract negotiated by my attorney dictated that I must appear in silhouette. This worked gloriously.

All of this is deliberate. I have been famous, more than once, and fame holds no allure for me. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to maintain visual anonymity in the age of social media. We are photographed and videotaped by iDevices everywhere.

I cherish my ability to stalk the sois of Bangkok in anonymity. I am just an old, fat farang, nobody important. People who encounter me forget me immediately. And that is how I want it.

Mike Yon and myself a couple of years ago after dinner in Bangkok.

I prefer that any attention that I attract be diverted to my writing. It was foretold that I will die within the next ten years. I want to be remembered for what I write--not for whom I was photographed with. Not for how I look. You see, I am not aging gracefully. Maybe this is about vanity after all. But vanity of a different kind. When I write about myself I am also writing about our generation, about the children of the 1960's whose twilight years are already upon us.

It is for fate to decide whether I will succeed. We do not have long left. The clock is ticking. It never stops, it never slows, it is implacable, and it is impervious to all human manipulations.

In the meantime, it will please me if those who possess recent photos of me will embargo them until after my death. Just save them. Release them after I die.

Then it will no longer matter. In the end, we are all destined for oblivion.

Wednesday, February 06, 2019

Interview with Karl Monger at GallantFew

My Ranger brother Karl Monger interviewed me for the second time a couple of weeks ago, and he posted the interview as a podcast on the GallantFew Podcast page.

Karl interviewed me for the first time last year, in 2017, for his New American Veteran series.

Karl distinguishes himself tirelessly assisting Ranger veterans in transition: from serving in uniform to returning to civilian life--a transition that is supremely challenging.Think on this for a moment. Young airborne Rangers face the same dilemma year after year: to remain in the US Army for 20 years? Or to separate and attempt to return to civilian life? I advise anyone who asks me to stay in for 20. When you get older, that retirement income is vital. The medical insurance through TriCare is far superior to medical care purchased on the economy. When you get older, medical treatment becomes a major line item in your monthly budget. Either way, transition is not simple. Serving soldiers in the Ranger Regiment are immersed in an encompassing culture. You know precisely where you fit, you know exactly what is expected of you, and it takes everything that you have to meet those expectations. The Ranger Regiment is comprised of world class soldiers. Many do separate to return to academia. Speaking for myself, I was too young, too unfocused, too undisciplined when I attended university the first time in 1978-9. I was more interested in the esoteric bookstores surrounding the CU campus. I ended up dropping out, and I enlisted in the US Army via the Ranger option in 1979. By 1987, after four years in the 2d Ranger Battalion and two years in the 1st Special Forces Group, I was ready to return to academia. I was a relentless student, laser focused on my schoolwork. I earned a 4.0 GPA by the time that I was commissioned a lieutenant in the Infantry in 1990.I learned discipline in the US Army. While I was a student, I remained attached to the Green Machine through ROTC. I was an airborne Ranger, a combat veteran: I was virtually unstoppable.

My own transition happened after I resigned from DEA in 1991. I was suddenly cut loose, no longer a soldier. The USG determined that I was physically incapable of being a soldier. I refused to accept this, and I returned to the Special Warfare Center, the home of the Green Berets, in 1992. By 1994, the verdict was impossible to deny. I was done. I literally did not know what to do. This is what is meant by transition. When an individual is faced with the fact that they no longer have a place in the Green Machine, when they realize that they no longer belong to the greatest Army in the history of mankind, it leaves you adrift, unrooted, and confused.Serving in the US Army, working for the federal government, means that you serve something larger than yourself. We identify ourselves with what we do: "I am an airborne Ranger." Or, "I am a Green Beret." We do not think about this while we are doing it. It is only after we separate, after we can no longer do it, that the bill comes due, and we are confronted with an implacable metaphysical fact. "I am just Stephen." This is difficult to handle. Many handle it better than others. Some handle it poorly. I was one of those who mishandled transition. I wish that GallantFew was available to me in 1994. I stumbled through my own transition on my own with no resources, and little guidance. I talk about the years that I spent forging my identity as a soldier in Metamorphosis. I have not yet addressed my transition from soldier to civilian. That may come as I wrap up my final forecasted book, In the Valley of the Shadows: A Place of Smoke and Rivers Like Mirrors, projected for 2020. Karl is endlessly supportive of the books that I publish, and I am very grateful to him.

If you are still serving in uniform, please donate to GallantFew, particularly if you are serving in the Ranger Regiment.

If you are in mid-career or retired, please donate to Karl's nonprofit. You can google his organization's ratings, which will reveal that GallantFew is too small to be rated by Charity Navigator. But you will see that Karl has GallantFew on a straight path. Karl Monger and GallantFew focus on the transition from soldier to civilian. Whether you separate to return to school or finally retire after 20 years in uniform, you will make that transition from soldier to civilian. I just met with members of the GallantFew network in Orlando, former airborne Rangers that get together for breakfast every month. Wonderful men. Excellent fathers. Good husbands. Fine examples for other civilians: superb sons of the Republic.

These two interviews with Karl Monger are the only interviews that I have given since I was interviewed by the Military History Channel in 2005.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Call the VA White House Hotline!

This is what happens when you call the VA White House Hotline with a legit gripe: they fix it, and fast. Many veterans do not know that such a mechanism exists, so I write this piece explaining how to use it.

Those who read my work and follow me on Facebook know that the Department of Veteran's Affairs and I tussle, and a lot.

My latest dispute with the VA was caused by schedulers at the VA's Lake Nona facility in Orlando. I need to renew my medications, and my last visit to Lake Nona was over a year ago. So I scheduled appointments, and I bought a plane ticket.

Then the schedulers canceled appointments that I made months in advance.

It is my decision to live as an expat in Bangkok, and this complicates my health care. I see a cardiologist every month and a pain specialist at my own expense, and it is not cheap.

I could seek reimbursement for these expenses through the VA's Foreign Medical Program, but the process is complex, it requires meticulous documentation, and it is prone to error.

The last time that I tried to get reimbursed the VA clerk told me that the medication in question was not on the VA formulary. I just shake my head. The VA prescribed it for me, and they provide it for me every month.

Just one example. I have stacks of receipts that need to be submitted to the FMP. They repay expenses two years in arrears. Someday. I wish that they offered an online process for reimbursement. They are stuck in the 1970's.

I need to monitor my INR levels as every cardiologist that I see tells me that I will die from a stroke and it is impossible to know when that stroke will strike. So I take warfarin every evening and I pray the Jesus Prayer when I do so.

My cardiologist also monitors my blood sugar levels, and she is nagging me fierce. What I put in my mouth is one of my lone pleasures, and she is crowding me. So my diet is increasingly strict. No carbs. Ok. Few carbs.

My pain specialist is a psychiatrist, she prescribes my opiates, Methadone and Codeine. My addiction to opiates began with a gall bladder that tried to kill me several years ago. It was excruciating, and that was when I encountered the solace of Mother Demerol.

My opiate addiction is controlled, I take strict dosages of Methadone to manage addiction, and Codeine when I cannot sleep due to breakthrough pain. I suffer from crippling arthritis, the price that I pay for 333 parachute jumps and many years under a heavy ruck.

I would love to transition to a hemp or cannabis treatment, but it is not yet legal in Thailand. Medical marijuana is legal in many American states, and it seems inevitable that it will finally be legalized at the Federal level--which would make it available to veterans through the VA.

In time. If I live to see it.

Enough about that. I made appointments to see my primary care physician, my shrink, my neurologist and my cardiologist at the Lake Nona VA facility all the way back in September and October 2018. I made the appointments for one week in January 2019, so I could fly to Orlando, check into a hotel, and knock them out over a few days.

All was well until December, when the Lake Nona facility began canceling my appointments. Doctors were canceling them for various reasons, and the schedulers then told me that no appointments were available for many months.

I flipped out. I harangued a scheduler on the phone, I called the patient advocates at Lake Nona and complained my ass off, and then finally, I remembered: The VA White House Hotline fixed a problem for me before. Why not try them?

So I did. I called, I was immediately connected to an agent, his name was John, I laid out the problem, John heard me out, then he said that he would open a case file and poke his liaison at Lake Nona. I received an email with a case number in moments.

And just like that, shazam, the problem was fixed.

Two days later schedulers from Lake Nona called me, Google Hangouts gloriously rang the calls through to my iPad in Bangkok, and they made new appointments for me during the week that I will be in Orlando.

When the VA tells you that no appointments are available for several months, do not believe them. They can squeeze you in. This is proof of it. When somebody with sufficient authority tells them to fix their shit, they can do it.

The VA then sent me an email a few days ago telling me that those appointments were rescheduled, and I almost flipped out again, but I reminded myself that the VA White House Hotline fixed issues for me twice before, and I could just call them again.

I prayed. I pray and I meditate during my daily walk in my neighborhood, so I walked and I prayed, and the next day, I received the letter above in my mailbox.

The Medical Center Director at Lake Nona who sent me that letter included a list of my upcoming appointments, and they were all listed. Mr. Timothy W. Liezert, Medical Center Director, sent that letter to my address in Bangkok. Other automated letters were sent to one of my addresses in CONUS. All the appointments are for the week of 22 January 2019.

Victory.

I will take it.

There is no guarantee that a doctor at Lake Nona will not attempt to cancel another appointment before that week, but I suspect that my patient record is flagged to the effect of "Do not mess with this veteran because he will raise an unholy ruckus."

Plus, we have an ally there, a man on the inside: Norm Hooten is on the Pharmacy staff at Lake Nona. I will make it a point to say hello. And Mr. Liezert gave me the name and direct phone number of Ms. Sanchez, whom I suspect is a manager of scheduling. At minimum she is a manager. She may be the Director.

I wrote before that somebody anonymously helped me with previous challenges with the VA. I still do not know who that person is, or was. But I know that somebody out there in the vastness of the internet picked up a phone and advised somebody at Lake Nona to take care of me.

To that anonymous angel, I again render my thanks. I know that you are no mere figment of my imagination. Too many synchronicities occur. I do not believe in coincidence.

And yes, I thank President Trump, whose gatekeepers deep-six every letter that I ever send to him, I thank him for following through and setting up the VA White House Hotline.

It just works. We desperately need a way, any way, to contend with the VA, which is tied with the IRS for most frustrating and incompetent government agency in the federal constellation.

Some 22 veterans a day kill themselves. Each is an individual, as the Hindu put it, a universe, irreplaceable, a sudden black hole in the human continuity, but there is no doubt in my mind that frustrations with the VA are implicated in most of them.

I understand that frustration. Before you eat your gun, call the VA White House Hotline and talk to an agent there.

Saturday, January 05, 2019

Revelation Revisited

Aleister Crowley, LAM, Dead Souls Exhibition, Greenwich Village, 1919. This portrait of LAM was published in The Equinox, (aka The Blue Equinox) Vol. 3, No. 1, (1919), and as the frontispiece to Crowley’s Commentary (Liber LXXI) to Helena P. Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence (1889). I write about LAM on my other site, Samizdat.

I finally posted a new article on my other site, Samizdat. I use the pretext of a review on an article to revisit themes that are threaded throughout my book Revelation.

This is all high strangeness. I lavished photos and hyperlinks to arcane sources throughout, so if you are inclined to bend your consciousness without illegal substances, click through!

I began writing Revelation as a preface to Metamorphosis, and it took me a couple of months to realize that it was just continuing to expand.

Writing Revelation was a process in learning, I continually researched as I wrote, and writing this review made me realize that I am not done with those subjects by a long shot.

That preface turned into a book. I was so married to the idea that it was a preface that I published the whole mess as The Rosetta Stone of Memories. When Amazon priced the paperback at $88, I realized that I needed to split up the halves and make them into separate books. Sometimes I am not that smart. :)

So Revelation and Metamorphosis were the result. Those books are selling steadily in small numbers every day. I am not getting rich, but the numbers keep rising. Amazon holds royalties for 90 days, so I will see no money from those books for another month.

Google and Apple pay royalties every 30 days, so small amounts rolled in immediately. I took Momma out to dinner. I am not sure if I need to do something to start royalty payments from Barnes & Noble. I will give them a couple of weeks then look into it.

For some reason, Amazon is the default bookseller for most of us. I do not understand it. Google makes it a policy to undersell Amazon--Revelation is selling there for $7.99, less than the $9.99 that Amazon charges, and Google still pays me my $5 per copy sold.

Their sales profile is very different from A Tale of the Grenada Raiders. That book sold a ton of copies in the first 60 days after release and then it tapered off. I am astonished to see that folks are still buying that book a year after I released it!

Writing on my Samizdat site is very different from writing a book. In a book, I use inline academic references. On Samizdat, I hyperlink the hell out of everything, post photos with abandon, and include the inline references anyway.

Writing the narrative is the easy part. Then the grunt work of doing bizarre Google searches comes into play, sourcing photos, and ensuring that they are not under copyright (almost always), and meticulously crediting them. I cheated a bit with this last piece. I admit it: I got lazy.

As it is possible to include hyperlinks in eBooks, like Kindle or GooglePlay books, or iBooks, I may write first on Samizdat then port over articles into iBooks Author, which is my preferred writing environment.

The formatting that I use handles URLs nicely in eBooks. It is theoretically possible to embed videos into eBooks, so I will have to experiment with that. I do not do much with video. I prefer text. It takes too long to watch a video, and the process is passive. A book, I can scan ahead, reread, and mark up the text taking notes.

If I make enough in royalties to buy a new Mac, I will do some videos. I want to read my books and make my own AudioBooks. That way you can listen to them while you drive. My MacBook Air is not enough Mac for video. It is a great text machine. I push it to its limits.

Another funny thing. My Samizdat page on Facebook has 913 Likes and 948 Follows! That is a hundred more than MKD. But we know that Facebook suppresses the distribution of MKD. We have, as you know, shifted most news commentary over to Spreely. Enough censorship.

Thank you for reading my work! I appreciate it when you buy my books! I love it when you leave reviews! Leave reviews anywhere, wherever you purchased the book.

And to my cherished patrons on Patreon: Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

PolitiFact counters news reporting that annoys the neoliberal mandarins of social media. Any news espousing a pro-MAGA bias is anathema to the overlords of Facebook.

Facebook suppresses conservative news sources. Facebook censors pro-MAGA pages, and shadowbans folks like you and I when we express views that debunk globalism. The mandarins of social media, our Facebook overlords, reject economic nationalism: they repudiate any America First worldview and dismiss us as xenophobic, nativist and racist. I myself am a disabled and decorated Latino veteran and an expat. I live in Bangkok. So much for the identity politics of neoliberalism. We editors of Magic Kingdom Dispatch make no apologies for our prioritization of Americans and America. We are unrepentant economic nationalists, our government must take care of Americans first. Every American city is blighted by homeless citizens. Veterans are homeless. Many Americans go to bed hungry every day. This is unacceptable. In America we enjoy surpluses and wealth that could care for every American citizen. Our problem is one of prioritization, incompetence, greed and distribution.

Many reading these words have been subjected to time-outs by the overlords of Facebook. I myself was blocked from posting because I expressed opinions about illegal immigration. Like the rest of the MAGA-verse, I reject open borders, and I demand a Wall--a real Wall. A gigantic, looming, technological Wall. A Wall that will forever disrupt human trafficking and drug trafficking. A Wall that will keep America safe. I will be satisfied when America enjoys a Wall that rivals the Great Wall of China on our Southern border. A Wall that is visible with the naked eye from Earth orbit, a Wall that will outlast our Republic, and become a perplexing historical artifact after our civilization recedes into dust.

We editors of Magic Kingdom Dispatch on Facebook long ago realized that Facebook suppressed the organic growth and reach of our page: www.fb.com/magickingdomdispatch. Facebook's algorithms impose a neoliberal worldview: if Facebook controls our inputs, if Facebook controls the data that we access, then Facebook controls our thoughts and our conclusions. Whomever controls the predominate narrative rules the world. We will not be ruled. We will not obey. We will not comply.

We consequently transitioned all posting from Facebook to Spreely. We will speak our minds, we will curate news links that Facebook censors, and we will comment without fear of shadowbanning. We will not be suppressed.To read the forbidden news and commentary that is banned on Facebook, we invite you to join us there.

As a compendium Revelation puts forth a genuinely novel position. It needs to be archived somewhere in the Library of Congress or National Archives as a treasure.

********

First off, I agree with Yon's position and believe your auto-ethnography is ahead of its time--though not so far off as some may think.

I'm not sure many will get it immediately; however, I believe the timing is at the cusp of potentially some major shifts/evolution in humanity (next industrial revolution, AI, evolution of the human brain/consciousness, etc.).

The universe finds mysterious ways to communicate in times of major shifts and the synchronicity is powerful.

1) The concepts you've woven together in a written form, which can be limiting to what you're doing, are incredible. Life experiences, philosophy, religion, science, sociology, psychology, etc... Very difficult to do.

2) Your integration across the external and internal realms is masterful. Few can dip into the ephemeral collective and individual unconscious and come back out of the rabbit hole.

You have live-access to non-linear constructs in a way I don't think I've ever come across. Psychologically, the way you negotiate going into the primordial shadow (shadow isn't bad) of yourself, the collective, and your brotherhood is visceral and flows with spirit.

3) At minimum, your writing should be taken from how you make meaning of the world through lived (conscious or unconscious) experiences and how that informs your relationship with yourself and the world around you.

This journey honors those that have shared your experiences, shaped you, and the lives that carry on within you as a keeper of memories.

It is a heavy burden to hold with a physical and psychological toll, but also one that has strength, generosity, dedication, and cares. It is the true burden and privilege of leadership.

4) The auto-ethnographical account in terms of meaning-making experiences follows what Robert Kegan outlines in his book, The Evolving Self, where life is a series of tilts, and negotiating those tilts/truces is how we grow.

Getting stuck or not having an opportunity to live/negotiate a "stage" due to traumatic events or just skipped experiences creates a skewed developmental growth.

With post-traumatic stress also comes spiral post-traumatic growth. Equilibrium rarely exists and it usually signifies that a change in direction is near (an apogee).

Other psychologists, theologians, and philosophers have similar concepts that you capture.

As a learning exercise, I am thrilled with all the reference material as I'm seeing stuff that I haven't seen or that I am just topically aware of. Not a criticism, rather an affirmation. This goes to my last point...

5) You could have gotten a Ph.D in Philosophy or interdisciplinary studies with the level of detail, research, conceptual integration, etc. put into this--though I understand that is not what drives you nor should it.

The quality of the material is that good, in my humble opinion. Not everyone will agree with you or your conclusions and that's ok--the way your thoughts are constructed has a logical novelty to it.

Many may not yet get it, as it requires deep comprehension of psychology, religion, and lived experiences in a way that few have right now. Maybe in the future.

Thank you for putting non-linear experiences that you have been subjected to into words that can be accessed as objects by others.

Truly complex, really rich work. I can only imagine that my struggle coming up with words for this review is challenging.